The Skylark's Secret(6)
As I balance the box on the bonnet of the car and dig in my bag for my keys, the tinned pie topples and clatters on to the tarmac. Behind the window of the shop, several faces turn in our direction.
I open the door and bundle Daisy into her car seat. Not surprisingly, she makes her thoughts on this outrage known at the top of her lungs. I wrestle the straps over her flailing arms without a word because if I open my mouth I’m not sure I’ll be able to restrain myself either from swearing loud and long or bursting into tears.
I turn to pick up the pie from the road. But Elspeth stands there, her big-eyed baby gazing up at me inscrutably from her pushchair.
‘Here,’ she says, holding out the dented tin.
‘Thanks. Not much of a supper, but it’ll have to do for tonight.’ My embarrassment and shame make me babble nervously.
Elspeth nods, glancing through the windows of the car, taking in the box of kitchen stuff and the desk lamp that are wedged against the glass. She looks as if she’s about to say something, then thinks better of it and turns her pushchair around. ‘Be seeing you.’
‘Yeah.’ I stand there lamely for a moment, watching as she wheels her fragrant, neatly dressed baby back along the road, turning in at the gate of one of the houses that overlook the harbour before manoeuvring the pushchair through its yellow-painted front door.
Then I ease my stiff limbs back into the driver’s seat and take a deep breath before turning the key in the ignition. ‘Right then, Daisy,’ I say, as cheerfully as I can, hoping she doesn’t hear the wobble in my voice, ‘Keeper’s Cottage, here we come.’
The sound of knocking awakens me the next morning. After being up into the small hours, the pair of us had at long last collapsed and fallen into a deep, deep sleep before the dawn began to suffuse the sky beyond the hills.
Our disrupted night owed a good deal to Daisy’s refusal to go to sleep in the silent and unfamiliar darkness: she’d been used to the background hum of traffic and the glow of a light-polluted city diluting the blackness to the colour of weak orange squash, tucked into her own cot in her own bedroom. By the time I’d changed her and fed her, waiting for the immersion heater to warm the water enough for a shallow bath, and then got her ready for bed, she was wide awake, enjoying the novelty of the tiny cottage filled with my mother’s things. To prevent her from wreaking destruction among the ornaments and photos that cluttered the sitting room, I attempted to remove the lid from the battered pie tin at the same time as juggling Daisy on my hip.
After wrestling for several minutes with the ancient tin opener and the dented metal encasing my supper, and having ripped a gash in my finger that dripped bright blood everywhere, eventually I admitted defeat. Wrapping a wad of loo paper around my wound, I turned off the oven and poured myself a gin and tonic instead. Then I took Daisy through to the bedroom and made up the bed, an awkward job with my injured hand. Someone must have been in, as the mattress had been stripped and the linens laundered and stacked back neatly in the airing cupboard.
I knew there was an old wooden cot in the attic, the one I’d slept in at the foot of this same bed in this same room when I was a baby, but by now I was beyond fetching the ladder from the shed, finding the cot and bringing it down, then assembling it. So I tucked Daisy into a nest made out of blankets and curled up on the bed beside her. But she was having none of it. Clean, cosy and well fed now, she was a new woman and ready for some fun and games after her long and boring day in the car. Even in my exasperation, I couldn’t help laughing as she rolled herself over and over, tangling the bedcovers around us both.
I tried singing softly to her, but the sound of my cracked voice brought the tears to my eyes and so I stopped. I fished her favourite Blue Bunny out of the bag of her toys and found a picture book. But gymnastics were more what she had in mind and so I bounced her on my tummy, her little legs working like pistons, in an attempt to wear her out. After half an hour, my arms were aching almost as much as my head. The gin was a bad idea, I decided, and I scooped up both Daisy and my half-full glass and went back through to the kitchen. I left the glass on the table next to the gin bottle, then wandered through to the sitting room to gaze out of the window.
The old windowpanes had always let in a bit of a draught and so I wrapped Daisy in the shawl Mum had knitted for her when she was born, its pattern of scallop shells as delicate as the finest lace. I stroked her back, trying to lull her into sleepiness, the white wool soft beneath my fingertips. For a moment, an image of my mum sitting beside the fire, the cobweb-fine skein of this same wool in her lap as her knitting needles flew, threatened to overwhelm me again. I shook my head and blinked back the tears, too tired to cry any more today.
The moon was rising behind the cottage, casting a path across the loch. It was high tide and I could just make out the water lapping softly at the sand beyond the road’s edge. Oblivious to my maudlin weariness, Daisy cooed and chattered, pointing a chubby forefinger at the window and naming each new sight in her own matter-of-fact way. ‘Dat,’ she said, and, ‘Dat.’
The silence of the night was broken occasionally by the cry of a curlew from the shore. As I spoke softly to my baby daughter, kissing her freshly washed hair and rocking her gently on my shoulder, the quiet sound of an engine out on the loch made us both look up. A small fishing boat slipped across the sliver of moonlight, leaving a streamer of stars dancing in its wake where the propeller had stirred up the phosphorescence.